Construction Time Again
[Smash Hits, 16th August 1984. Words: Tim de Lisle. Pictures: Mike Putland.]
CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN
If you wanted to give your grandmother a nice holiday, you wouldn’t send her to Berlin.
The West side is dirty, noisy, sleazy and overrun by teenagers – the girls all look like Nena and the boys all look like the boys in her band. The East side is clean, silent, prim and drab, and the Wall between the two sides is horrible, a constant reminder of what’s wrong with the world.
But then your grandmother isn’t – or I assume she isn’t – a pop star. In the eight years since David Bowie, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop worked together in Berlin everyone from David Sylvian to Killing Joke has followed them across Northern Europe. The studio that they all use is the Hansa Tonstudio, set in a typically post-nuclear Berlin landscape and well within firing distance of the East German soldiers on the Wall. This is where Depeche Mode have come to mix their fourth album, though the only things being mixed when Mike Putland and I arrived one lunchtime were several kinds of muesli – breakfast for Daniel Miller, the band’s manager, producer and record company boss.
The band turn up soon afterwards, Martin Gore from the flat he shares with his German girlfriend, the others from the Hotel Intercontinental. They sit around the mixing desk, drinking coffee, talking hard and cracking jokes. The first thing Andy Fletcher says to me is “What happened in the test match?” Like many cricket fans, he’s fond of facts and figures: when the conversation turns to Frankie Goes To Hollywood the only thing he has against them is that they look like equalling Gerry And The Pacemakers’ feat of going to Number One with their first three singles.
This is Depeche Mode’s eleventh day in Berlin – before that they did two months’ recording in North London – and, like the first ten, it’ll be spent mixing the new single “Master & Servant”. The 7” version is complete and, for my benefit, they play it through the studio’s biggest speakers. They’re slightly smaller than the doors and could probably make “The Smurf Song” sound impressive. “Master & Servant” sounds wonderful but it’s hard to imagine how it would come across on the radio. “All right,” Dave Gahan says, “we’ll put it through small speakers.” It still sounds wonderful.
The plan is to finish the 12” today, which means adding two minutes or so to the seven they’ve already got. The sounds are all laid down on tape: it’s just a matter of putting them down in the best possible order – like doing a jigsaw puzzle when the pieces fit a thousand different ways. This would be complicated for one person: for six (the band, Daniel, and Gareth Jones the engineer and co-producer) it’s tortuous. Gareth looks like a computer programmer in his grey suit, white shirt and stripey tie, and that’s more or less what he is. Most of the noises on the single have been put through a computer and on the mixing desk there are two video screens as well as 2000 switches.
Over lunch in the studio restaurant I ask Martin if making a record now has more to do with technology than music.
“Not really, ‘cause all the songs are written before we get into the studio, and we demo everything before we sample the sounds.”
Sampling, he explains, means feeding non-musical noises into something called a Synclavier, which “sequences” them i.e. turns them into musical noises. [1]
“We’ve used quite a lot of toy instruments. Me and Andy went to Hamleys and bought nearly everything in the musical department – xylophones, toy pianos, toy saxophones.”
So how much do they use conventional instruments?
“Less and less. We’re up to at least 50% sampled sounds now, maybe 60%.”
Is the single typical of the new LP?
“Typical of some of the songs,” says Martin, who writes them. “But I think there’s quite a cross-section. We tried to get away from the kind of theme we had running through the last album. Some of the songs, the new single for instance, could be called an extension of that [2], whereas some are different – there’s a couple of love songs, which we’re bound to be slagged for, but I think they’re more honest than the earlier ones – things like “See You” were very concocted love songs. The new album is very sincere!”
Do they have any ambitions left?
“We never really had ambitions,” Andy says. “It’s never been our ambition to be Number One, say, ‘cause we feel we’d never get to Number One anyway. Too many people hate us.”
Who are their fans now? “It’s about 50-50 girls and boys,” Andy says, “and they’re mainly 16-20 now. It used to be mainly girls, and mainly younger than that. We don’t get them screaming any more – we’re not that good-looking, are we? Not exactly pin-ups!”
After a quick go on the video game in the restaurant – Martin and Andy are addicts and Martin announces that he’s the “seventh best player in the world” – it’s back upstairs for another eight hours’ work on the “Master & Servant” 12”. For everyone except Gareth this means sitting and thinking rather than doing anything, but it’s hard work nonetheless. Snatches of the track are played over and over again.
Fortified with coffee, mineral water and a copy of Smash Hits (they were delighted with the letter from Tony Shaw of Derby who called himself “Probably Their Greatest Fan Of All Time”) they eventually complete the job at 12:30am. The lights are turned down, the volume right up, and the 12” is played straight through twice to the tapping of toes and the nodding of heads.
They’re pleased with it. And rightly so.
[Smash Hits, 16th August 1984. Words: Tim de Lisle. Pictures: Mike Putland.]
CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN
If you wanted to give your grandmother a nice holiday, you wouldn’t send her to Berlin.
The West side is dirty, noisy, sleazy and overrun by teenagers – the girls all look like Nena and the boys all look like the boys in her band. The East side is clean, silent, prim and drab, and the Wall between the two sides is horrible, a constant reminder of what’s wrong with the world.
But then your grandmother isn’t – or I assume she isn’t – a pop star. In the eight years since David Bowie, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop worked together in Berlin everyone from David Sylvian to Killing Joke has followed them across Northern Europe. The studio that they all use is the Hansa Tonstudio, set in a typically post-nuclear Berlin landscape and well within firing distance of the East German soldiers on the Wall. This is where Depeche Mode have come to mix their fourth album, though the only things being mixed when Mike Putland and I arrived one lunchtime were several kinds of muesli – breakfast for Daniel Miller, the band’s manager, producer and record company boss.
The band turn up soon afterwards, Martin Gore from the flat he shares with his German girlfriend, the others from the Hotel Intercontinental. They sit around the mixing desk, drinking coffee, talking hard and cracking jokes. The first thing Andy Fletcher says to me is “What happened in the test match?” Like many cricket fans, he’s fond of facts and figures: when the conversation turns to Frankie Goes To Hollywood the only thing he has against them is that they look like equalling Gerry And The Pacemakers’ feat of going to Number One with their first three singles.
This is Depeche Mode’s eleventh day in Berlin – before that they did two months’ recording in North London – and, like the first ten, it’ll be spent mixing the new single “Master & Servant”. The 7” version is complete and, for my benefit, they play it through the studio’s biggest speakers. They’re slightly smaller than the doors and could probably make “The Smurf Song” sound impressive. “Master & Servant” sounds wonderful but it’s hard to imagine how it would come across on the radio. “All right,” Dave Gahan says, “we’ll put it through small speakers.” It still sounds wonderful.
The plan is to finish the 12” today, which means adding two minutes or so to the seven they’ve already got. The sounds are all laid down on tape: it’s just a matter of putting them down in the best possible order – like doing a jigsaw puzzle when the pieces fit a thousand different ways. This would be complicated for one person: for six (the band, Daniel, and Gareth Jones the engineer and co-producer) it’s tortuous. Gareth looks like a computer programmer in his grey suit, white shirt and stripey tie, and that’s more or less what he is. Most of the noises on the single have been put through a computer and on the mixing desk there are two video screens as well as 2000 switches.
Over lunch in the studio restaurant I ask Martin if making a record now has more to do with technology than music.
“Not really, ‘cause all the songs are written before we get into the studio, and we demo everything before we sample the sounds.”
Sampling, he explains, means feeding non-musical noises into something called a Synclavier, which “sequences” them i.e. turns them into musical noises. [1]
“We’ve used quite a lot of toy instruments. Me and Andy went to Hamleys and bought nearly everything in the musical department – xylophones, toy pianos, toy saxophones.”
So how much do they use conventional instruments?
“Less and less. We’re up to at least 50% sampled sounds now, maybe 60%.”
Is the single typical of the new LP?
“Typical of some of the songs,” says Martin, who writes them. “But I think there’s quite a cross-section. We tried to get away from the kind of theme we had running through the last album. Some of the songs, the new single for instance, could be called an extension of that [2], whereas some are different – there’s a couple of love songs, which we’re bound to be slagged for, but I think they’re more honest than the earlier ones – things like “See You” were very concocted love songs. The new album is very sincere!”
Do they have any ambitions left?
“We never really had ambitions,” Andy says. “It’s never been our ambition to be Number One, say, ‘cause we feel we’d never get to Number One anyway. Too many people hate us.”
Who are their fans now? “It’s about 50-50 girls and boys,” Andy says, “and they’re mainly 16-20 now. It used to be mainly girls, and mainly younger than that. We don’t get them screaming any more – we’re not that good-looking, are we? Not exactly pin-ups!”
After a quick go on the video game in the restaurant – Martin and Andy are addicts and Martin announces that he’s the “seventh best player in the world” – it’s back upstairs for another eight hours’ work on the “Master & Servant” 12”. For everyone except Gareth this means sitting and thinking rather than doing anything, but it’s hard work nonetheless. Snatches of the track are played over and over again.
Fortified with coffee, mineral water and a copy of Smash Hits (they were delighted with the letter from Tony Shaw of Derby who called himself “Probably Their Greatest Fan Of All Time”) they eventually complete the job at 12:30am. The lights are turned down, the volume right up, and the 12” is played straight through twice to the tapping of toes and the nodding of heads.
They’re pleased with it. And rightly so.
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